‘I need to ask you something,’ said Steve the sandwich man, looking me up and down suggestively as he buttered my baguette.
‘I need to ask you something,’ said Steve the sandwich man, looking me up and down suggestively as he buttered my baguette.
I like Steve. I call at his sandwich hut just off the A3 almost every time I go to the stables to ride my horse. I always order a tuna mayonnaise baguette with salad no onions. And he and I always have a little flirt with each other while he makes it. Steve has spiky peroxide blond hair, a ring through his nose, and lots of tattoos. But I’m getting to that stage in life when such things are no longer a bar to romantic progress. Age may very well be God’s way of making you see beyond a fuzzy blue and green eagle on a hairy chest to the beautiful soul within, or whatever.
So as Steve buttered my baguette with a more than usual amount of enthusiasm while giving me rather intense looks, I thought: ‘Hmm, I suppose it could work. Maybe a bit of rough is what I need. And, anyway, he’s not actually that rough. He’s made a success of his catering business so he might be quite a good prospect, compared with some of the losers I’ve been out with. I mean, look at the queue and it’s only Tuesday. If everyone here spends five pounds…’ ‘I want to make a mould of you,’ said Steve, setting the baguette down with unnecessary force on the counter.
This is the sort of thing that could only happen to me. ‘Pardon me?’ I said, feeling instantly desperate. Only I could end up being compromised over a tuna baguette by a tattooed roadside café owner who wants to put me in a plaster cast. In fact, I’m willing to bet that of all the thousands of women who have bought tuna baguettes from roadside cafés in Surrey over the years I am the only one who has been asked if I want a cast of my upper body with it.
‘What? Eh?’ I said, hoping the whole issue would just somehow go away, possibly by us all disappearing down a wormhole at the other end of which was a plane of existence where Steve had simply handed me a tuna baguette and said, ‘That’ll be £3.50, please.’
‘It’s nothing weird or anything like that,’ he said, looking like it was definitely something weird and exactly like that. ‘I’m married, I’ve got a wife at home. Ask him.’ He gestured to his business partner, who looked up from flipping burgers to give me a baleful stare.
Steve struggled on: ‘It’s just that I make models, you know, busts, and I need women to pose for them and …what happens, right, is that I cover you in stuff called alginate and…you would wear a bodice underneath…’
His partner stopped burger flipping and gave me another look. I think I detected a slight headshake.
‘If you were allergic to the mould we could try a special hypoallergenic material…’ said Steve, sounding desperate now. Yes, I thought sarcastically, because that’s the only reason I would be saying no. ‘I’ve been doing it for years, honestly,’ he pleaded. ‘What do you think?’
I looked down at my tuna baguette: a simple pleasure, something I had grown to look forward to, in fact, I would go so far as to say, one of the few things in my life that was uncomplicated and straightforward. It would never taste the same again.
‘I get claustrophobic,’ I said. ‘I can’t be put in a mould.’ Steve looked crestfallen. His business partner looked relieved.
‘Also, I’m not sure I’m model material.’ I don’t know why I thought I even had to justify saying no to a strange man asking me if I wouldn’t mind being covered in plaster of Paris.
‘Well, think about it,’ said Steve, as the queue behind me started to get restless with all the truckers longing for their bacon sarnies and polystyrene cups of tea. Lucky sods. They didn’t have anything to worry about. ‘You don’t have to say yes right away.’ That was an understatement.
‘Out of interest,’ I said, ‘where would this model-making take place?’
‘At my house in Chertsey,’ he said, as if it was the most natural place in the world for a sandwich-maker to put one of his customers in a plaster cast from the waist up.
I picked up my baguette and handed him a fiver. ‘Well, thanks for the offer,’ I said, waiting for my change. ‘I’ll certainly think it over and have nightmares.’
Then I will start going to the bakers in the village down the road for my sandwiches. ‘Tuna mayonnaise, please,’ I shall say to the old lady in a pinny behind the counter. ‘No onion. Easy on the fetish requests.’
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